Division of Ecological and Water Resources (Waters)

ArcGIS Shapefiles

A shapefile is the geographic information systems (GIS) digital map layer format that is designed to work with ArcGIS software. A shapefile is a combination of three or more files. For example, a shapefile called chempt.shp is actually a combination of the following three files, all of which must be available for the shapefile to work properly:

chempt.dbf

chempt.shp

chempt.shx

Download all related files for a shapefile, and save them in the same folder.

ArcGIS is a registered trademark of Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (ESRI).